I don't have the career, I don't have the Comp. Sci. degree - I'm getting mine sometime in spring.

I'll have $30k in student loans hanging like a fucking albatross around my neck. My wife already has $70k from getting her Masters degree - before the bottom fell out of the psych market. She's relying on me to bring in the big bucks so that she can be a part-time worker, part-time parent.

I don't have the heart to break it to her. I've spelled it all out to her, but I just can't come out and say, "Honey, we're in debt for the rest of our lives, and we'll be lucky to keep making $10/hour, let alone what we're making right now."

There's this book I read (I'm going somewhere with this, trust me) where somebody equated going through a certain experience as being like a fish hauled out of the water, and held just close enough to the surface that it could see that it had been swimming in water the whole time.

"But whatever you do," said the book, "Don't put that fish back in the water with other fish who haven't had the same experience. He'll be swimming up to them, and saying, 'Hey, this is water we're swimming in, water!' They'll just shake their heads, and when he's gone, say 'Poor Ned, he just hasn't been the same...'"

You'll know the difference. I know the difference. It will haunt you until the end of your days, like it haunts me every moment I'm awake. It is why I wake up at three in the morning and stare at the ceiling, wondering how I'm going to do it - how I'm going to make a career while all around me the world is falling to pieces, and do I have the guts, when it comes to it, to pick up the torch of revolution against the fascist pigs? Will I leave this place a better world for my spot in it, or will I too live out my life in quiet desperation, pretending that I never understood anything greater?

I work with computers because, from the moment I first saw a Pong machine in the basement of the Seattle Science Center, I wanted to make those dots move on the screen. I do not resent some poor bastard from another country struggling to make ends meet - I was born into privilege, as were we all \ufffd and that privilege was too much of a drain on the rest of the world. It\ufffds like crabs in a pot. If one crab climbs too high, the rest will pull him down trying to climb out themselves. Meanwhile, we\ufffdve got the "cooks" up at the top giving us a helpful little push while getting ready to make the world over in their own fascist image.

No, I don\ufffdt want to take it lying down. I hope not a single one of us here is willing to take it lying down.

I just don\ufffdt know how (or where) to stand.